While architects in general are quite good at lamenting the insignificance of their role in any design project (see all that 75 percent anxiety), it's good to see someone else thinking of HSR as an architectural opportunity.

Last month, [Joseph] Bellomo sent a letter to the rail authority, the state agency charged with building the $45 billion rail line, proposing a two-tiered international competition in which architects and designers from around the world would send in proposed designs for the entire line. The proposals would be narrowed to three finalists whose ideas would be further developed.

"The only way to get good design, holistic design, is through competition," Bellomo said.

I'm not entirely sold, however, on his idea to tackle the whole 800 mile route at once, as a single project. How does one even begin to design a cohesive plan for that kind of a site? Or would you just have a very general scheme for different types of corridors? Over 800 miles, the exceptions and specifics would add up very fast. Still, the idea of a consistent design idea is an admirable enough goal. Read the whole competition proposal here.

In all my reading, I've found plenty of support for my thesis of transportation as a generator of public space. In spite of all the encouragement, however, it's pretty disheartening to read something like this (especially from an author you admire):

In dispersed areas, architects will have to give up on their dream of fixed rail transit as a generator of public spaces. Margaret Crawford, "Architecture and Dispersal"

"Giving up the dream" is a tough idea to swallow in the middle of one's thesis project, and, I suspect, a little counterproductive. Coming to terms with the realities around an academic architecture project is one thing; dispensing with everything critical and subversive and theoretically challenging about the project is another entirely. Finding a balance between castles-in-the-air design and concession to the status quo is a particularly anxiety-ridden task for every architect worth his or her salt, I suppose, and there's already an echo-chamber of debate on the topic (well worth reading, nonetheless).

I started the semester with this paragraph, from my original thesis proposal:

Designers must be able to productively address the American suburb and still maintain an energy of resistance and social progress, working to change the system from within that system itself. In order to effect real positive change in the public realm, architecture must engage the political realities of its production, rejecting positions of either detached criticality or enthusiastic “pragmatism”. By addressing the politics of program, site, and construction through design, without retreating into metaphorical abstraction or surrendering to glib commercialism, architecture can regain meaning and relevance in the lives of its users.

I still agree (kind of), but it's taken me another three months or so to decide that, for this project, I'd rather error on the side of 'critical detachment'. I realized this sometime around 5am last week, when, as I was verifying that my site plan drawing was accurate down to the hundredth of a foot, it occurred to me that it doesn't really matter because I'm still in school. Now: while it's not like I want to design in a vacuum, I do hope to maintain a certain critical ambition throughout the design process.

[...] Another interesting thing about de Certeau's views is that he has a faith in collective creativity of subjects, in their tendency to invent ways to use the spaces that are given to them. You could argue that the traditional notion of public space is a kind of top-down argument whereby public space is 'given' to the public. I would turn that equation around to say: how does the collective create public space with the spaces that are given/found? This means that the role of the architect is to make a space for that public – to create the conditions where the public can freely exercise its collective creativity. It's for this reason that I've always been suspicious of the attempt to overscript the use of public space. For me, a successful public space is precisely a space where something unanticipated happens.

Stan Allen: "Architecture and Dispersal" from Cities of Dispersal

First go at a schedule for 502 next semester – too optimistic, most likely, but I think it's worth being ambitious. Right now: working on site plan, high-speed rail diagrams, public space catalogue, &c, for 490, and I should have a rough draft of the 501 paper by Friday (this is also optimistic).

First diagram! CAHSR mapped over population density – future stations classified as urban, suburban, exurban – rings scaled to projected ridership.

Protected from direct antagonistic competition and with large quantities of surplus value at its disposal, the large corporation faces an acute problem of finding a market to absorb expanding output as well as to help expand the rate of circulation of surplus value. The corporation must therefore create, maintain and expand the effective demand for its products. There are various strategems available. Perhaps the most successful is to create a need while eliminating the possibility for that need to be met by a substitution of product. The effective demand for automobiles (as well as oil products, highway construction, suburban construction, etc.) has been created and expanded through the total reconfiguration of the metropolitan built form so that it is all but impossible to live a "normal" social life without a car [...] A need has been created out of a luxury.

David Harvey: Social Justice and the City

If we are ever to come to terms with the current proliferation of the megalopolis in both a socio-cultural and ecological sense, then we shall only be able to do so in a post-facto compensatory way, that is to say by adopting denser patterns of land settlement and by providing adequate infrastructure for public transport, operating at differentiated speeds – from fast inter-city trains to slower intra-city light rail transit systems, augmented by buses. As far as the first is concerned I have in mind the high-speed train that has been an ongoing development project in Europe and Japan for the last 35 years, with the result that today for inter-city journeys of up to 500 kilometres, rail has become preferable to air travel in terms of trip time, reliability, energy consumption and environmental pollution.

Kenneth Frampton: "On the Predicament of Architecture at the Turn of the Century"

Thanks for summarizing the first three-quarters of my thesis project!